Since diverse noises and irregularities impact on sensor data, self-declaration of sensor data reliability is crucial for advancing Internet of Things applications and industrial automation. Relevant works on reliability include sensor self-attribution of data confidence, and self-diagnosis of sensor faults using temporal data redundancy or neighboring sensor data. Models are built on edge devices and then transferred to sensors. Overall, the existing methods are computationally expensive, require real-time data from other sensors and incur considerable transmission overhead. Therefore, they are not suitable for independent sensor data reliability assessment. Addressing these issues, we introduce an independent reliability self-declaration method for sensors. Two Kalman filter-inspired, block-based lightweight algorithms are designed that handle isolated and burst noises and estimate block data reliability. Moreover, a conceptual model to dynamically adjust block size is proposed leveraging noise level and maximum TCP/IP packet size to reduce data transmissions. The reliability levels are conveyed using TCP header reserved bits to avoid communication overhead. The approach was tested using water quality monitoring (WQM) and healthcare application datasets. Results show, for burst noise, our lightweight and scalable approach attains superior accuracy in WQM (89.06%) and healthcare (82.63%) for five-level reliability estimation. A real-world deployment using an Arduino-based sensor node demonstrates the feasibility of the approach for in-sensor operation.

Abstract Remote patient monitoring (RPM) has been gaining popularity recently. However, health data acquisition is a significant challenge associated with patient monitoring. In continuous RPM, health data acquisition may miss health data during transmission. Missing data compromises the quality and reliability of patient risk assessment. Several studies suggested techniques for analyzing missing data; however, many are unsuitable for RPM. These techniques neglect the variability of missing data and provide biased results with imputation. Therefore, a holistic approach must consider the correlation and variability of the various vitals and avoid biased imputation. This paper proposes a coherent computation pattern-matching technique to identify and predict missing data patterns. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated using data collected from a field trial. Results show that the technique can effectively identify and predict missing patterns.

Understanding and integrating physiological data collected from wearable sensors in remote patient monitoring (RPM) is challenging. Data streams may be interrupted due to the sensor’s sensitivity, movement, and electromagnetic interference leading to inconsistent, missing, and inaccurate data. Existing approaches to summarize data flows into a single score such as the traditional Modified early warning score (MEWS) is limited. Data visualization approaches have the potential to address this challenge, but few studies have focused on visualization of RPM streams. The study presents a transformation of observed raw RPM physiological data into parameters identified as trust, frequency, slope, and trend. This facilitated visualization and enabled automated assessments of prioritized alerts. Experimental results have shown that the transformations led to the prioritization of clinically significant conditions, and improved visualization has the potential to better support clinical decisions compared with traditional MEWS.

Sensor data is susceptible to faults, noise, and malicious attacks, posing a significant operational and security threat. Therefore, ensuring reliability of sensor data is critical for real-time monitoring systems. Prior research on sensor data reliability relies on edge or upper-layer devices for data fusion from multiple sensors, employing architectures with major overheads and latency due to transmission and storage demands. An alternative approach is to have the sensor estimate and declare its own reliability. While some methods involve sensors computing data confidence and including it in payloads, limitations arise in the absence of neighboring sensor data, and communication overheads are incurred. To address this problem, this paper proposes an innovative approach to enhance the reliability of sensor data using an intelligent self-declaration process. Proposed reliability estimation is evaluate with three lightweight estimation algorithms, namely, Kalman Filter, Holt-Winters Method, and Mahalanobis Distance using sensor’s historical data. The reliability level is then added to the three reserved bits of a TCP packet header which results in zero additional overhead. Experiments conducted using real-world sensor data (from water quality monitoring systems) obtained from our IoT lab demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal and the potential for application in real-world sensor-based applications.

The seamless integration of sensors and smart communication technologies has led to the development of various supporting systems for financial technology (FinTech). The emergence of the next-generation Internet of Things (Nx-IoT) for FinTech applications enhances the customer satisfaction ratio. The main research challenge for FinTech applications is to analyze the incoming tasks at the edge of the networks with minimum delay and power consumption while increasing the prediction accuracy. Motivated by the above-mentioned challenge, in this article, we develop a ranked-based service deployment strategy and an artificial intelligence technique for financial data analysis at edge networks. Initially, a risk-based task classification strategy has been developed for classifying the incoming financial tasks and providing the importance to the risk-based task for meeting users’ satisfaction ratio. Besides that, an efficient service deployment strategy is developed using$Hall's$theorem to assign the ranked-based financial data to the suitable edge or cloud servers with minimum delay and power consumption. Finally, the standard support vector machines (SVMs) algorithm is used at edge networks for analyzing the financial data with higher accuracy. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy and SVM model at edge networks over the baseline algorithms and classification models, respectively.

Internet-of-Vehicle (IoV) enabled Maritime Transportation Systems (MTS) communication is anticipated to support ultra-reliable and low latency, diverse quality-of-service (QoS) and large-scale connectivities. To meet such stringent demands, a cognitive ambient backscatter non-orthogonal multiple access (C-AmBC-NOMA) IoV-MTS network is proposed. We explore the reliable and secure performance of the proposed C-AmBC-NOMA IoV-MTS network with in-phase and quadrature phase imbalance (IQI) at radio-frequency (RF) front-ends and the existence of an eavesdropper. In particular, the analytical expressions on the outage probability (OP) and intercept probability (IP) are obtained after a series of calculations. For a deeper understanding, we discuss the asymptotic behavior of OPs in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region, the diversity orders of OPs, and IPs in the high main-to-eavesdropper ratio (MER) regime. The results of Monte-Carlo simulation and a series of corresponding theoretical analysis show that: i) As the SNR approaches infinity, the OPs tend to be fixed non-negative values, indicating that the diversity orders of the OPs have error floors; ii) When the MER approaches infinity, the IPs of legitimate users decrease continuously, while the IP of backscatter device (BD) increases; iii) Compared with the system performance under ideal condition, the system performance is less reliable under IQI condition, but the security performance is enhanced; iv) By carefully selecting the system parameters, a trade-off can be achieved between reliability and security.

Abstract Basketball is a mathematical game with many abstract data interpretations. An average fan ceases to witness the revolution in sports, which is influenced using data science and analytics unless someone brings it to light. Nowadays, teams look at data and tend to make decisions on scouting the player for the team. The decision making for the coaches can be made easier using machine learning algorithms to identify the star potential of players. The paper provides a novel algorithm by building a machine learning model on all players to predict whether the player is a star or not. Besides, an interactive user interface is developed for coaches to input the player's data and to make an informed decision based on the prediction.

We are pleased to present a special issue that focuses on the software systems for managing the impact of the coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected around 192 million people worldwide and has led to ˜4.13 million deaths as of July 22, 2021. Globally, most of the countries have implemented lockdowns to protect their citizens. However, lockdown over an extended period is unsustainable. Hence, it is widely believed that virus testing and tracking is the best approach to ease lockdown measures. There is a need for innovative software systems to manage the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic effectively in many areas such as healthcare system, transport systems, supply-chain system, educational system, government-service delivery, pharmaceutical companies, manufacturing, software industries, and multinational companies. For example, in healthcare, smart-software systems would be able to remotely measure a person's body temperature, heart and respiratory rates, identifying their movements (including sneezing, coughing, shivering, etc.) to identify whether a person is displaying symptoms of COVID-19 or not. An essential aspect associated with these technologies is data privacy, scalability, and quality of service (QoS) in terms of reliability, availability, security, latency, and energy which need to be considered throughout the development of the software systems. In countries like India, UK, Russia, Brazil, and USA, the system would also help to ensure that isolated communities have access to testing, delivered in a fast, accurate, and efficient manner. These software systems would help and support the assessment of public-health strategies and policies such as social distancing and assess further interventions to control the spread of the virus. Innovative software systems can increase stakeholder participation, as cost-effective assistance in the COVID-19 pandemic monitoring is of great interest to many countries. To manage the impact of this pandemic, there is a need to design and develop scalable, reliable, and energy-efficient sustainable software solutions for different COVID-19 scenarios. In consideration of the existing systems and their features, an Internet of Things (IoT)-based system suitable for COVID-19 or pandemic situations associated with other influenza viruses can be developed. Furthermore, these systems can be integrated with artificial-intelligence (AI) processes for effective data-collection, analysis, statistical visualization, sharing, and decision making. Moreover, these systems can be implemented using both simulations and real-time testbeds for COVID-19 operations (sanitization, medication, monitoring, thermal imaging, etc.) to test their performance in terms of scalability, reliability, availability, and energy efficiency. There is a need to use AI methods, such as reinforcement learning, deep learning, and genetic algorithms while developing IoT-based software systems to achieve self-learning, self-adaptation, and autonomous decision-making capabilities in order to improve efficiency of the systems. Meanwhile, a huge voluminous amount of complex data is generated from various sources including World Health Organization (WHO), social networking, edge devices, private and public hospitals, patients and academic institutes, which needs an effective big data analytics mechanism to manage this data proficiently. Furthermore, there is a need to study the impact of system configuration on workload processing at different cloud nodes while maintaining the QoS dynamically. The data are collected in databases, it is subsequently examined and monitored, and it is important to manage data consistency and integrity. In this context, we argue that it is essential to employ decentralized data-gathering approaches, maintaining the privacy of the population as a high priority. This special issue has received articles by researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry to develop innovative software systems for managing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This special issue, therefore, aims to focus the attention of its readers to four research articles carefully selected after multiple rounds of peer-review. The brief contributions of these papers are discussed in the following section: The first paper entitled "An approach to forecast impact of COVID-19 using supervised machine learning model" by Mohan et al.1 proposes a hybrid model to predict the effect of COVID-19 using moving regressive, autoregressive, and ensemble learning model. This work uses two datasets from Worldometer and Ministry of Health & Family Welfare of India to conduct the countrywise predictions across the world and statewise predictions of India, respectively. The second paper entitled "NovidChain: Blockchain-based privacy-preserving platform for COVID-19 test/vaccine certificates" by Abid et al.2 includes various promising ideas such as maintains the immutability and data integrity using Blockchain technology, enhances the privacy by incorporating encryption for personal information and verifies the COVID-19 proof using W3C verifiable credentials standard immediately. The third paper entitled "Software System to Predict the Infection in COVID-19 Patients using Deep Learning and Web of Things" by Singh et al.3 generates synthetic data using various data augmentation techniques. Proposed system uses U-Net and WoT to segment the COVID Medseg and Radiopedia datasets in an autonomic manner. Experimental results show that the system gives better performance in terms of network latency, response time, and server latency. The fourth paper entitled "Advanced Data Integration in Banking, Financial, and Insurance Software in the Age of COVID-19" by Maiti et al.4 contributes to recognize the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global Banking Financial Services and Insurance landscape. Further, a hype cycle has been developed to find out the important software technologies to handle real-world challenges related to corporate. We believe the work that has been approved in this special issue will assist readers of the journal and a broader research community to learn about the topics of software systems and impacts of COVID-19 pandemic, and inspire them to study more in this area. We would like to express our gratitude to the Editor-in-Chief (Prof. Rajkumar Buyya) and editorial board members for allowing us to bring out this special issue and guiding us throughout the process. We also want to express our gratitude to and further acknowledge the administrative staff, reviewers, and especially the authors for their contributions to the success of this issue.

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is an emerging technology whose capabilities to self-organize itself on-the-fly, to monitor the patient's vital health data without any manual entry and assist early human intervention gave birth to smart healthcare applications. The smart applications can be used to remotely monitor isolated patients during this COVID-19 pandemic. Remote patient monitoring provides an opportunity for COVID-19 patients to have vital signs and other indicators recorded regularly and inexpensively to provide rapid and early warning of conditions that require medical attention using secured edge and cloud computing. However, to gain the confidence of the users over these applications, the performance of healthcare applications should be evaluated in real-time. Our real-time implementation of IoMT based remote monitoring application using edge and cloud computing, along with empirical evaluation, show that COVID-19 patients can be monitored effectively not only with mobility but also helps the health care professionals to generate consolidated health data of the patient that can guide them to obtain medical attention.

Conventional Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems involve data streaming from sensors, through Fog devices to a centralized Cloud server. Issues that arise include privacy concerns due to third party management of Cloud servers, single points of failure, a bottleneck in data flows and difficulties in regularly updating firmware for millions of smart devices from a point of security and maintenance perspective. Blockchain technologies avoid trusted third parties and safeguard against a single point of failure and other issues. This has inspired researchers to investigate blockchain’s adoption into IoT ecosystem. In this paper, recent state-of-the-arts advances in blockchain for IoT, blockchain for Cloud IoT and blockchain for Fog IoT in the context of eHealth, smart cities, intelligent transport and other applications are analyzed. Obstacles, research gaps and potential solutions are also presented.

Summary Internet of Things (IoT) is finding application in many areas, particularly in health care where an IoT can be effectively used in the form of an Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) to monitor the patients remotely. The quality of life of the patients and health care outcomes can be improved with the deployment of an IoMT because health care professionals can monitor conditions; access the electronic medical records and communicates with each other. This remote monitoring and consultations might reduce the traditional stressful and costly exercise of frequent hospitalization. Also, the rising costs of health care in many developed countries have influenced the introduction of the Healthcare Monitoring Application (HMA) to their existing health care practices. To materialize the HMA concepts for successful deployment for civilian and commercial use with ease, application developers can benefit from a generic, scalable framework that provides significant components for building an HMA. In this chapter, a generic maintainable HMA is advanced by amalgamating the advantages of event‐driven and the layered architecture. The proposed framework is used to establish an HMA with an end‐to‐end Assistive Care Loop Framework (ACLF) to provide a real‐time alarm and assistance to monitor pregnant women.

The exponential growth of smartphones and other smart communicating devices has led to the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Literature shows, one person will have more than six intelligent connected devices in future. The existing network infrastructure and bandwidth will be unable to accommodate the growing number of smart connected devices, therefore, achieving the expected Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) remains a challenge. The advent and deployment of 5G network bring a massive number of innovative network services and exceptional user experience by providing superior data rates. Despite numerous benefits that 5G offers, the security and privacy in 5G is a challenge due to the existing large number of heterogeneous networks (HetNet). To harvest the numerous benefits of 5G, it is imperative to provide adequate protection mechanisms to maintain the user and data privacy in growing HetNet. This article comprehensively addresses the existing security issues in 5G HetNet and solutions for the identified problems in the HetNet edge.

Blockchain technologies emerging for healthcare support secure health data sharing with greater interoperability among different heterogeneous systems. However, the collection and storage of data generated from Body Area Sensor Net-works(BASN) for migration to high processing power computing services requires an efficient BASN architecture. We present a decentralized BASN architecture that involves devices at three levels; 1) Body Area Sensor Network-medical sensors typically on or in patient's body transmitting data to a Smartphone, 2) Fog/Edge, and 3) Cloud. We propose that a Patient Agent(PA) replicated on the Smartphone, Fog and Cloud servers processes medical data and execute a task offloading algorithm by leveraging a Blockchain. Performance analysis is conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed Blockchain leveraged, distributed Patient Agent controlled BASN.

Blockchain emerging for healthcare provides a secure, decentralized and patient driven record management system. However, the storage of data generated from IoT devices in remote patient management applications requires a fast consensus mechanism. In this paper, we propose a lightweight consensus mechanism and a decentralized patient software agent to control a remote patient monitoring (RPM) system. The decentralized RPM architecture includes devices at three levels; 1) Body Area Sensor Network- medical sensors typically on or in patient's body transmitting data to a Smartphone, 2) Fog/Edge, and 3) Cloud. We propose that a Patient Agent(PA) software replicated on the Smartphone, Fog and Cloud servers processes medical data to ensure reliable, secure and private communication. Performance analysis has been conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed Blockchain leveraged, distributed Patient Agent controlled remote patient monitoring system.

In-house healthcare monitoring applications are continuous time-critical applications often built upon Body Area Wireless Sensor Networks (BAWSNs). Our Assistive Care Loop Framework (ACLF) is an in-house healthcare application capable of monitoring the health conditions of aged/patients over a dedicated period of time by deploying the BAWSN as the monitoring component. However, the wireless medium used in the BAWSN for communications is prone to vulnerabilities that could open a door to attackers tampering with or compromising the user's data privacy. Hence, it is imperative to maintain the privacy and integrity of the data to gain the confidence and hence, the acceptance of the users of the healthcare applications. Furthermore, in time-critical applications, the vital health conditions must be monitored at regular intervals within their specified critical time. Therefore, the security model proposed for the BAWSN must not incur undue overheads when meeting the critical time requirements of the application. In this paper, we propose and implement a secure adaptive triple-key scheme (aTKS) for the BAWSN to achieve the privacy and integrity of the monitored data with minimal overheads. We then present the performance results of our scheme for the BAWSN, using real-time test-bed implementations and simulations.